British Agent Tells (a Bit) of Years Undercover in Ulster

By ALAN COWELL

Published: December 23, 2005

For decades, Denis Donaldson was a prominent insider in the Irish Republican movement in Belfast. He served in prison with Gerry Adams, leader of its political arm, Sinn Fein, and Bobby Sands, the hunger striker, who died in 1981. He trained in Lebanon with Hezbollah militants.

So it was all the more stunning last week when he held a news conference in Dublin and declared himself a British agent. No one had even a slight suspicion.

''He was affable, humorous, unassuming, intelligent,'' said Danny Morrison, a former Sinn Fein associate who is now a novelist. ''He didn't lead a lavish lifestyle; I doubt if he even owned own his own house. He didn't drink too much. He didn't gamble. He didn't drive a flashy car. His wife never wore fur.''

Mr. Donaldson's double life told a story of awful choices familiar to readers of John le Carr?Behind the open conflict of the Troubles, as the long Northern Ireland conflict is called, lay a war of shadowy handlers pressing informants to the worst of betrayals.

''There had to be a moment when he was compromised,'' Mr. Morrison said in an interview. ''He would have had to make a choice -- between living with the consequences of what they were going to expose about him, or deciding to enter into a pact with people who had inflicted so much suffering on his own community, his friends, himself.''

In the beginning, it must all have seemed much simpler.

According to accounts pieced together from former associates, journalists and scholars, Mr. Donaldson's early career followed a familiar trajectory in Ulster.

He volunteered for the I.R.A. and in 1971, as a young adult, was caught trying to bomb a distillery and government buildings. He was sentenced to four years and shared prison accommodation with Mr. Adams, establishing a bond that made the betrayal all the more poignant.

Mr. Donaldson, now 55, also featured in a jail-cell photograph of the hunger striker, Mr. Sands, adding to the credentials that underpinned his career in the Republican movement. It also made him an attractive target for the British to turn.

Mr. Donaldson was arrested again, in 1981, in France while returning with a false passport from a Hezbollah training camp in Lebanon, said Brian Feeney, a historian and author of a recent study of Sinn Fein. He was held briefly and released.

This incident was evidence of his role in fostering the international ties that the I.R.A. built up with supporters in the Middle East, including Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya.

Some time during this period, Mr. Donaldson, by his own account, became a spy for the British. The details of his recruitment are unclear and he was not available for an interview. Former associates said they believed that Mr. Donaldson was in hiding in the Irish Republic.

''I was recruited in the 1980's after compromising myself during a vulnerable period in my life,'' Mr. Donaldson said at the news conference in Dublin. Offered a choice of being exposed or informing, he said, ''I have worked with British intelligence and R.U.C./P.S.N.I. Special Branch,'' referring to the Northern Ireland security police. ''Over that period I was paid money.''

Once he had taken a first step into the world of secret intelligence, many people here said, retreat would have been difficult.

''The handlers would start off slow,'' said Richard English, a professor of politics and the author of a history of the I.R.A. ''They would say: every so often you will give us a bit of something and you will get a bit of money.'' But, once he had taken the money, ''it was difficult for him to get out'' without risking execution by the Irish Republican Army.

Mr. Donaldson's later work as an agent coincided with a critical period when the armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland was giving way to a political drive by Sinn Fein.

After the 1998 Good Friday agreement, the cornerstone of peace efforts, Mr. Donaldson also became Sinn Fein's administration chief at Stormont, the provincial parliament.

''As Sinn Fein became more important than the I.R.A., Sinn Fein also became more important to the Special Branch,'' said Professor English. From the point of view of the intelligence agencies, ''they had a man at the heart of the key bit of the Republican movement, which was the political movement.''

Sinn Fein officials dispute Mr. Donaldson's importance. ''He was in the middle leadership,'' said a spokesman for Sinn Fein, who spoke in return for anonymity under the organization's rules covering contacts with reporters. ''He was never a member of the negotiating committee. He wouldn't have been a senior figure. He wouldn't have had access to confidential papers.''

For all that, he emerged abruptly into the limelight when the police raided the Sinn Fein office at Stormont in October 2002 and arrested Mr. Donaldson and two other men, accusing them of spying for Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. -- a remarkable charge against a man who now says he was a British agent at the time.

Prosecutors dropped those charges without explanation two weeks ago, and Mr. Donaldson insisted last week that the entire episode at Stormont was a conspiracy by intelligence agencies to undermine the Good Friday agreement.

''The so-called Stormont-gate affair was a scam and a fiction,'' he said in Dublin. ''It never existed. It was created by Special Branch.''